[adelevie]

Give away some kind of free software that is useful and production-quality. That something should also be related to a larger, growing trend. You'll generally get higher quality clients, a non-low rate, and a more fun project (since it's centered on using a tool that you built). And you also don't have to make cold calls--the software should stand on its own and send the leads to you.

I've learned this from my own experience writing/maintaining various open source libraries centered on using Parse with Ruby. The rapid growth of Parse has caused at least a handful of their thousands of developers to want to use it with Ruby (either for a Rails app, or a native iOS app with RubyMotion). Of those people, at least a handful have contacted me looking for a freelancer. Of those people, some have become paying clients.

[IceCreamYou]

I can confirm this. I wrote quite a bit of open-source software that has attracted thousands of users over the years and now my clients find me instead of the other way around.

You need to do more than just write the software though -- you need to be active in discussions where people are looking for software like yours, because that's often how people end up arriving at your software. Ideally the software you're building also supports some other software with a decent user base rather than trying to do something completely independent; that way you have a pre-established target user base who may already be looking for your solution.

Additionally, I started out doing contracted development work, and now I mostly do consulting. It's less stress and easier to predict how long it will take. And I get to spend my development time on my own projects.

A final note: if you contribute to other open-source projects, sometimes you can get in touch with the primary maintainer and have that person forward you work they don't have time to do.

[boopsie]

Absolutely agree. My spouse is an active contributor to an open source project. Often, someone will come into IRC asking for help, and soon realize that the scope of the problem is bigger than they thought. Their next idea: "I should hire someone to do this for me." If you have demonstrated your tech skills, ability to communicate, and willingness to help a client... you might get the gig.

It doesn't have to be open source. As long as it's a community of techies working together to solve a problem, being the Helpful Cheerful Person in the Neighborhood can lead to consulting work.

[sherm8n]

What do you do for consulting and how did you transition into it?

[IceCreamYou]

There are a lot of different situations. Some common ones:

1) When people come to me and say "I need someone to build X for me," I usually say "I can help you make sure X gets done right." If the person contacting me isn't especially technical, that means I remove the weight from their shoulders of verifying that they actually got what they paid for when they hire another freelancer/contractor to do the job.

2) Sometimes people already have devs either hired internally or managed externally, and they're having trouble and just need someone to come in and tell them how to get back on track. This might involve some code but it wouldn't actually be my job to write the code, just more of a training thing / someone to call.

3) Sometimes startups with non-technical founders in particular just need guidance on what they should actually be doing with technology. They don't know how it could improve their business, but they do know that they like what my software says it can do, and they're not sure what to do next. Usually these people are trying to compensate for a lack of a technical co-founder.

4) A lot of the time the initial email to me isn't looking for a consultant, and the business may not even have considered the idea; but sometimes especially larger institutions know that they want a consultant with intimate knowledge of the software they're working with. You can't get that by hiring a consulting firm.

Transitioning was easy -- I just started telling people I would do consulting instead of development work when they contacted me. I had intentionally not take development work that involved maintenance agreements for some time (I rarely built complete sites; I just built components or additions to my own open-source software). It also helped that I had spent a lot of time meeting with entrepreneurs and hearing about the businesses of people who had previously hired me. But there is a lot to know about consulting just like there is a lot to know about development and it takes some research and experimenting to deliver good experiences.